Why Rubio Isn’t a “Winner” on Immigration

Chris Cillizza tries to make the case that Rubio has emerged from the immigration debate a political winner. Here he makes a strained comparison with Romney:

Politicians who have failed to sell an issue position where they stand apart from their party almost always fail because they come across as inauthentic. (See: Romney, Mitt.) Principled opposition can be sold — as long as it is genuinely principled.

This is a reminder that the Rubio-Romney comparison doesn’t work very well. Romney was perceived as inauthentic because he was willing to say anything, no matter how incompatible with his governing record or previous views, in order to win the Republican nomination. Rubio’s position on immigration may very well be his real view, but he didn’t campaign on this position and condemned his election opponent for holding the view that he now professes. I don’t know if Rubio’s current position is a “principled” one or not, but the fact is that he has tried to have it both ways on the same issue in just a few years. Romney was a serial panderer who desperately wanted conservatives to approve of him. Rubio is using his reservoir of conservative goodwill to abandon the position they thought he held in order to promote legislation that most of them loathe to one degree or another. This is the opposite of what Romney did on the national stage, which is why it seems likely that Rubio’s support for the immigration bill will come back to haunt him.

Considering the role that Crist’s support for the stimulus bill in 2009 played in his primary defeat at Rubio’s hands, it is hard to overlook the fact that Rubio is playing a much more pivotal role in helping to advance a major item on the Obama administration’s domestic agenda than Crist ever did. Put another way, Rubio wouldn’t be in the Senate today if it had not been for Republicans’ extremely negative reaction to Crist’s much less consequential support for part of Obama’s agenda. At this point, Rubio has to hope that the House can’t pass a bill so that his role in promoting the legislation can begin to fade from memory.

16 Responses to Why Rubio Isn’t a “Winner” on Immigration

It’s historically illiterate not to realize that it’s the U.S. immigration system’s brokenness that has sorely contributed. It’s just a really bad idea to criminalize behavior of the usual and of long standing – the Amerindian migrations that have occurred for dozens of millenia in the southwest, preceding European conquest and the Europeans’ now deciding to build walls against nature.

Rubio can hardly betray his own, as well.

I suspect that the bill as written wouldn’t have legalized very many, dependent as it is on certain controversial milestones that could be argued to never have occurred, with deportations going on at the same historically high levels as they have under Obama.

The worst aspect of the bill, however, which as a result I could never support, is its further erosion of the Bill of Rights in favor of a centralized national security state with increased powers of surveillance and control, in which no one can engage in any significant transaction, including obtaining employment, without first being cleared, background checked and tracked by the federal government, against the unified national security database.

Like other totalitarian states, individuals must ask permission from the government, and be recorded, before being allowed to proceed.

You can pretend you are free this Fourth of July, but that is all it is, a fantasy of how things used to be, based on a rapidly diminishing inheritance from the past.

I will never vote for any ticket of which Marco Rubio is part. I will never vote for Jeb Bush, and I will never vote for any candidate who supports this garbage now being rammed down our throats.

Those of us who oppose immigration reform[amnesty] do so largely because we remember Simpson-Mazzoli, from 1986, and we know what a miserable failure that was. We know that when you reward bad behavior, you only get more of it.

I am a conservative because I believe that history teaches valuable lessons. If Rubio, McCain, Graham and the Bushes think those lessons can be ignored for political advantate or if they would prefer their supporters come from the part of the electorate easily cozened, they should have become democrats.

Marco Rubio will never be president. Marco Rubio will never even be vice-president. His support for amnesty rankles us unforgivably. We know that if this 2nd amnesty occurs, which will be far bigger than the 1st, we and countless people from around the globe will know that there will be a 3rd amnesty, and I shudder to think how many they’ll be demanding we give a pass on then.

“It’s historically illiterate not to realize that it’s the U.S. immigration system’s brokenness that has sorely contributed. It’s just a really bad idea to criminalize behavior of the usual and of long standing – the Amerindian migrations that have occurred for dozens of millenia in the southwest, preceding European conquest and the Europeans’ now deciding to build walls against nature.”

That’s an impressively literate display of history.

“Migrations over millennia”? “Behavior of the usual and ong-standing”? “Nature”?

I suppose to the historically literate that means when one Native American tribe went into another tribe’s customary territory to loot and kill, no Europeans were around to criminalize that behavior by drawing lines and putting up walls.

Now that the mestizos come over a controlled border to work in a modern economy … well, if you’re Fran, you can see the obvious parallels: That’s just the behavior and nature of millennia working its course.

“Rubio can hardly betray his own, as well.”

His own?

I thought “his own” were Americans?

Or did you mean Cubans?

They say only Nixon could go to China. Wouldn’t it be nice if more Hispanic American politicians – especially conservative Hispanic Republican politicians – recognized the importance of border security, obeying the law, and putting the interests of American citizens first over their duty to their co-ethnics.

“I suspect that the bill as written wouldn’t have legalized very many…”

I suspect your suspicions about this are as on the mark as most everything else you talk about.

Part of the on-going full court press to support immigration reform is the claim that the borders are already secured. This is a blatant lie that goes unchallenged by any congressman or major news outlet. One country alone, Honduras, exports almost 2% of its population a year to the United States. (Over 10% of its citizens already live here.) The 400 Hondurans a day that set out to take their share of the sueno Americano, at great expense, would not do so if they were not likely to get here. Honduras is an extreme, but several other nations are do the same thing. Mexico itself reports 140,000 foreigners a year enter Mexico on their way to the United States. It’s a wild underestimate, but still shows that the border is not secure. The current immigration trends will lead to the greatest social disaster of all time.

But it’s not broken. The elite in both political parties don’t want the border secure, each for their own reasons.

Sorry Fran Macadam, I don’t buy your historical apology for illegal immigration. There is little evidence for massive migration from the area now known as Mexico to the area now known as the United States in the time-frame before these nation-states were established. Even if accurate, it is still not a rationalization which is appropriate for today.

Rubio is going for what he believes is his ‘main chance’: Campaign contributions and political support from corporate America, who want CHEAP labor.

Remember, Republicans nominated John McCain in 2008 AFTER he championed the 2007 amnesty drive.

The neocons support “immigration reform”because it will force Republicans to move left. Michael Gerson said that Republicans should not only endorse immigration “reform”,but also issues like increasing the minimum wage,forget about spending cuts(not that we actually ever started)and make peace with the welfare state. Not to mention forget about stuff like abortion,traditional marriage and the second amendment. Nonstop war is ok though.

Gerson (who is a faith-based Bushian “compassionate conservative”, not a neocon–the actual neocons started out as hawkish Democrats but had already moved to the right on economic issues by the 1980’s) is unusual among pro-legalization conservatives. More typical are the *Wall Street Journal* types who want the government to be more laissez-faire than ever in economics (indeed, to them, restrictions on immigration are just another example of Big Government interfering with business’s God-given right to hire whoever they want at however low a wage they can get away with).

They do indeed support endless wars, but it is hard to see why that is a “left-wing” position. Non-interventionism as the default position of the Right died with Robert Taft, and his replacement by the ultra-hawkish Barry Goldwater as the icon of conservative Republicanism.

Whatever you think of the pro-legalization Right, most of them are *not* closet liberals or even moderates.

Massive immigration by low skilled workers drives down wages and increases the gap between rich and poor. It’s popular with corporate interests, because it keeps their labor costs down. And it’s popular with the wealthy and with the upper/professional classes, because it gives them cheaper goods and services.

But why on earth any self-described “progressive” would support this sort of thing is beyond me. I

It’s not 1880 anymore. We no longer have an abundance of unsettled land or a chronic labor shortage in this country. In 21st century America, large scale immigration is simply a scheme to make the rich richer and working people poorer. Full stop.

Either way, he is betraying his own. It won’t be good for Hispanics like him, either, if we give these illegals a mandate. Because Rubio is a)well-spoken in English, b)from a conservative anti-Communist political background and c)of the predominantly European type, he is just the kind of Hispanic that many of the illegals hate most. He of all people should know better.

So no, he is not “just looking out for his own.” Rubio is a snake in the grass by any account.

Fran MacAdam hates the historical American nation for displacing the Indians and wants us displaced in turn. The talk about “Europeans’ now deciding to build walls against nature” is just the usual blather from those who pretend that no state ever managed to secure their border at all,and who want to lie to us and tell us that the current immigration disaster was inevitable, rather than the result of conscious policy choices.

Not only do I have a problem with the Mexican immigrants of today, I have major problems with each successive flood of Germans, Irish, Slovaks and other dregs of humanity that I hold responsible for bringing this country to ruin.

If your idea of reading history is anywhere near to reading a Tom Clancy novel, I suggest more dynamic sources, such as basic descriptions of the migration histories of Eurasia or the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, not to mention the Americas and Africa. And you want to stay away from conceptions of people as unchanging in character and appearance over long periods. We are a species. We mix and mingle, and it would be unusual if we didn’t, because we always have.

Here’s another aspect of the historical reality of migrations: they’re almost always primarily economic. And for that reason, never welcome, not by cavemen, not by fishermen, not farmers nor merchants.

As soon as you find a way to stop the phenomenon of human migration, you will find a way to keep out the Mexicans. Until then, you perpetual fuming will provide ample entertainment for observers of your futility, something akin to a clown trying to eat an iced cream cone while straightjacketed. But that’s just the price of being a conservative, isn’t it? The whiff of gay laughter briefly audible as a fast moving train passes an old man struggling with his irascible donkey.

As Buchanan points out in some of his books, building a wall, closing the border, and having a zero-amnesty policy are only secondary to the question of getting English-speaking white America out of the anti-life mentality it has been poisoned with. That’s the real problem, not the Mexicans themselves.